I had a chance a while back to attemd a training session with Gary Friedman, a mediator in Northern Calilfornia, who is known as one of the foremost practitioners of joint session mediation. In fact, Friedman insists on conducting mediations start to finish with all parties in the same room. He will not even read mediation briefs marked as confidential, and he refuses to hold any information discussed with him during a mediation in confidence with respect to the other parties. If the parties to a mediation run by Friedman want to hold a private caucus, Friedman allows that, but they have to do that without without the mediator present. Since I am also a believer in joint sessions, I […]

At a mediation seminar I attended this week, Doug Noll, a mediator from Fresno, California, along with Don Philbin, a mediator from Texas, explained that hardly any of the information we process in communication with others is contained in their words. Nearly all of it lies in people’s gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, and other non-verbal cues. Lawyers have trouble accepting this fact, trained as we are in the importance of words. And we haven’t grasped its full implications. What was most interesting to me was a technique Noll tried to teach us that demonstrates to another person that they have been heard and understood. Instead of the frequently-taught method of summarizing the gist of what someone has just […]

If you’ve been paying attention to the news from the Middle East lately, you’ve probably read about large peace demonstrations in Israel, as well as the violent attack earlier this week in Egypt against the Israeli embassy. You might not have heard about a more hopeful event in Israel this week organized by some of these peace movement leaders. I saw something about this on David Harris-Gershon’s blog on conflict resolution in Israel and the Middle East. The event was called 1000 tables. The organizers set up roundtables in town squares in about 30 different cities, each table holding 10 chairs, and each group led by a moderator who might be a coach, group leader or mediator. Participants had the […]

One of the reports I was reading about the Norway shooting incident this past weekend mentioned the difficulties police have in trying to prevent such violent events. In the past, it might have been easier to infiltrate and keep tabs on hate groups because they used more traditional means of organizing themselves. Now that such people congregate primarily on the internet, it may be more difficult to penetrate their activities and predict when they will become violent. This suspect in particular was sending out somewhat ambiguous signals, which might not have provided sufficient clues to allow law enforcement to act. One problem with modern forms of communication is that they encourage people to interact mainly with like-minded individuals, and to […]

Twins, especially before they learn to speak our language, seem to share their own secret language, and communicate in ways that outsiders cannot understand. The two boys in the video clip below (well worth watching, even apart from its adorableness) also demonstrate that the words spoken in a conversation are much less important than we think they are. Perhaps intelligible language even distracts us from understanding the real substance of a conversation. When the words are unintelligible, that allows us to observe more closely the gestures and facial expressions that constitute most of the real communicating that people engage in. I might be fascinated by this video because I have twins of my own (teenagers now), and I still remember […]

Joseph C. Markowitz

Joseph C. Markowitz has published this blog, focusing on mediation and other forms of conflict resolution, since 2009. Mr. Markowitz practices law under the name "Law Offices of Joseph C. Markowitz," sharing space with three other attorneys in downtown Los Angeles. He has been in practice since 1980, emphasizing employment law, intellectual property, and general business disputes. Mr. Markowitz was trained as a mediator in 1994, and has served on one state court and two federal court mediation panels, in addition to handling private mediations. He also served as president of the Southern California Mediation Association in 2014.

For more information about Mr. Markowitz’s law and dispute resolution practice, go to jcmarkowitz.com